Entries in EPA
(6)

I was watching the tail end of Chris Wallace’s interview of new EPA director Scott Pruitt over the weekend, and was disheartened at just how sloppy journalism has become. During the interview Wallace, who was playing his own form of “gotcha” journalism with Pruitt kept referring to “facts” that were meant to prove that the Trump Administration’s 31% cut in EPA funding would be bad for the environment. These so-called facts recently have been debunked, but we know that, as the late American writer and satirist Mark Twain once said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Nine months after VW was caught using a defeat device on it diesel vehicles, it has come to an accommodation with the Environmental Protection Agency, and presented the agreement to the presiding judge, Charles Breyer. The 225-page agreement between Volkswagen AG, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the State of California and the Plaintiffs Steering Committee for the consolidated class-action lawsuits covers 499,000 vehicles, of which approximately 466,000 are still on the road. And while the $10.03 billion set aside to buy back or modify the offending vehicles has garnered the most headlines, it is the requirement for VW to remove 85% of the affected 2.0-liter turbodiesel-powered cars from U.S. roads by no later than June 30, 2019, that could have the greatest long-term financial effect on Volkswagen in North America.

Prager University’s You Tube channel has a new upload featuring Bjorn Lomborg. Like anything that has to do with the subject of global warming, or climate change, or whatever the hell it’s being called this week, Lomborg’s work has drawn much praise and many critics. And though Lomborg, who turned his study of statistics to the environmental arena in the late 1990s, believes climate change is real, he also questions whether the billions being spent to reduce CO2 emissions wouldn’t be better spent making certain everyone has access to jobs, clean water, food and other necessities like clean, inexpensive and reliable power. You know, things that actually will improve and extend lives.

In this video, Lomborg asks whether electric vehicles are as environmentally friendly and their promoters say. By looking at the lifecycle of the vehicle, and comparing it to the lifecycle of an average gasoline-powered car, Lomborg comes to a startling conclusion. Much as the EPA did when it was forced to admit that, if the U.S. cut its CO2 emissions by 100%, the world would be at most just 0.137 degrees C cooler by 2100. This number would increase to to just 0.278 degrees C if the entire industrialized world made the same cuts. It’s not much of a change, and the calculations assume the worst about CO2 and its warming effects. That is, the effect could be much less.

As we have pointed out before on this site, electric vehicles have their own set of problems, including higher CO2 levels/1,000 BTUs of energy, and use significantly more water than either gasoline or diesel to produce 100,000 BTUs of electricity. In addition, a recent study in the American Chemical Society’s Chemistry of Materials journal shows that the compounds used in lithium-ion batteries are toxic to Shewanella oneidensis, a common soil-dwelling bacteria that helps cycle metals in the environment.

This is not to say EVs should be banned. They have a place in the automotive universe, but a place much closer to internal combustion vehicles than their supporters are willing to admit.

Congress should stick to things it knows, and stay out of deciding those things it doesn’t. I know this would greatly restrict its ability to affect things — and make life easier and less complicated for all — but its requirement that the level of ethanol in fuel shall increase has been a mess from the start. Now, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE) approving the use of E15 (15% ethanol per gallon of gasoline by volume) in cars that were not designed to use this amount, consumers can expect to run into problems with their cars and trucks.

Is the past...It’s official. Automakers have to meet a 54.5 mpg CAFE requirement by 2025. That’s effectively double today’s standard. We’ve reported on this before, including the fact that the new standards have incentives for electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, natural gas-powered cars, and fuel cell vehicles. These include incentives for hybrid pickup trucks, both light- and heavy-duty.

The government sells this as providing incentives to “dramatically improve vehicle performance” though the requirements probably will have the opposite effect their writers claim should they be fully implemented. For example, Department of Transportation secretary Ray LaHood claims buyers of the average 2025 automobile can expect the following when compared to the average 2010 vehicle: